First Love, page 8
“Retail therapy is cheaper than regular therapy if you know how to find a good sale,” she said with her goofy laugh, and we clinked our glasses of wine. There was no sign of the recent distance between us as we ordered a second carafe and conversation flowed from the trials and triumphs of the present to the possibility of the future and the ache of the past, all threaded through with laughter and warmth.
I assumed it would always be like that, each ebb eventually followed by a return. That we’d always be looking up at the same moon.
* * *
—
Janis Joplin’s last album, Pearl, was recorded during the final weeks of her life—a posthumous work, like Ariel. It was her second album in the two years since she’d left Big Brother and the Holding Company at the end of 1968.
Janis stayed off of heroin for five months in the summer and early fall of 1970, while touring with her new band, Full Tilt Boogie, and even restricted herself to just a couple of drinks a night to protect her voice. Until she ran into her old dealer at the hotel she was staying at in L.A., and relapsed. She died of a heroin overdose early in the morning of October 4, 1970.
After her death, the band and their producer, Paul Rothchild, returned to the studio to re-record some instrumentals and splice together what they had of Janis’s unfinished vocals. Rothchild added her spur-of-the-moment recording of “Mercedes Benz” as the last track—ending with Janis saying, “Well, that’s it!” and laughing her scratchy giggle. That closing line, like so much of Plath’s Ariel, feels like it was spoken by a ghost.
Also like Ariel, it was this haunted work that truly cemented the artist as one of the greats. Released three months after Janis’s death, Pearl was by far the most commercially successful album of her career, eventually selling more than eight million copies. “Me and Bobby McGee,” one the three singles off of the album, stayed at number two on the charts for two weeks.
The original New York Times review of Pearl notes, referring to “Me and Bobby McGee,” “It is somewhat eerie to hear her sing that song’s chorus (‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…’)” in the context of her death. As I read this review and imagine people listening to Pearl for the first time months after Joplin’s death, Janet Malcolm’s assertion that Plath’s poetry wouldn’t have made the impact it did if not for her suicide echoes in my mind. The situations are not exact parallels—Janis was already famous when Pearl came out, she’d been on magazine covers and performed at Woodstock. She was already primed for this to be her breakout album. But still. It’s impossible that her death didn’t add weight to the album, didn’t make the sad songs sadder and the more upbeat ones bittersweet. That her death didn’t infuse the public reception of Pearl, making people even more inclined to see it as a masterpiece, emphasizing the tragedy of her death right when she was doing her very best work—as Sylvia noted she had been in a letter to her mother shortly before she died.
Tragedy makes us cherish a person more. And when that person was a sad girl in life—a blues singer or a writer of confessional poetry, or a friend who romanticized her own depression—tragedy cements them as a symbol, a cipher to be decoded. They become a metonym for the very idea of sadness; a witchy death-goddess rather than a human woman who lived and died.
I am perpetuating this pattern while I name it, I know. My motivation to dissect and understand the sad girl trope doesn’t absolve me of contributing to it. I’m mythologizing Heather, examining her pain because it killed her, even though I didn’t pay enough attention to it while she was alive. I’m writing this now as a kind of penance, shoving my callousness in my own face. Or maybe I’m writing to understand how I could have missed what was right in front of me.
* * *
—
In the months before her death, when she’d run out of people to call in the middle of the night, Heather started venting her sadness on Instagram instead. She posted frequently, mostly memes about mental illness and extreme close-ups of her face, bleary-eyed like she’d been crying. Slack, expressionless. Wearing too much makeup. Her posts made me uncomfortable.
I didn’t identify so much with the sad girl anymore by then. Partly because I genuinely wasn’t as sad as I had been—at least not in the layers of consciousness close enough for me to access. And partly because when I got it together and went to college, I very intentionally left a lot of myself behind. I didn’t want to show up in the world as a weepy, drunk, dirty street kid. I was ready to be an adult, ready to be so hypercompetent nobody would ever be able to tell there were pieces missing. Instead of snarling anger, I deflected with ambition and savvy. I still listened to Janis Joplin, but I didn’t sing along with abandon anymore; when anyone asked what my favorite novel was, I said East of Eden, not The Bell Jar. I left the sad girl behind, a relic of my youth when everything was heightened.
Heather didn’t.
At the time, the fact that she wanted her sadness to be seen made me take it less seriously. I thought she was playing into an image, and I didn’t worry too much. That was just Heather being Heather. I might even have referred to her posts dismissively as a “cry for help.” Now I see how fucked up it is that when we see something as a cry for help, we dismiss it rather than…helping. Now I remember that when we were teenagers telling adults how much we related to Esther Greenwood, trying to drink so much we’d get a free fur coat or at least make someone worry, we weren’t just trying to rub it in people’s faces—we were sending out a test signal. We were seeing if there was anyone there to answer the call when it was truly a matter of life or death, or if we were really as on our own as we felt.
But by the time we were in our mid-twenties, I felt like Heather should know better, or have more control, or be more careful what she put out in the world. We’d posted all kinds of dark shit on our LiveJournals back in the day, sure—but Instagram was different, less anonymous. And we were adults now, with professional jobs. I also didn’t yet fully understand what her bipolar diagnosis meant; how much was out of her control. I judged her for being such a mess.
Layered over that visceral reaction was a more conscious understanding that I was wrong—that she could post whatever she wanted—and I didn’t like myself for judging her. So rather than staying in the cycle of having a knee-jerk negative reaction each time I scrolled past a new lurid selfie and then feeling guilty for recoiling, I unfollowed her. (This was before Instagram had a “mute” option.)
Of course, after Heather died, I wanted to go back and scroll through all of those selfies, to examine them like clues, to see if maybe there was a caption that would feel like a message from beyond death, like Plath’s “Dying / Is an art” or Joplin’s fervent encouragement to “cry, cry baby.” But she’d locked her account, so I couldn’t. It took seven years for me to swallow my guilt and ask Sydney to take screenshots of some of Heather’s posts and send them to me.
* * *
—
I remembered Heather’s feed as one bleary-eyed, desperate-looking selfie after another, hard to look at and hard to look away from. But in the month before she died, I notice when Sydney sends me a folder full of screenshots, there were only a few of these. I find them beautiful now—not for their tragedy, but just because they’re my friend’s beautiful face. They don’t look as dramatic as I remembered. Interspersed with these selfies is a perfectly normal-looking amalgam of glimpses of her life: a sign for evening services at her synagogue, a spread of new paints, a David Foster Wallace meme, a tattoo she liked of a sloth’s face and the words “Live slow, Die whenever,” and an absolutely stunning black-and-white photograph of her in which her hair is curled and her eyebrows darkened, and she looks like a Wong Kar-wai heroine.
Twelve days before she died, she posted a smiling photo of herself with the caption “One week. Different world. Different mood. Different me. Living proof. Things do get better.” I scanned back through her posts and saw that seven days earlier she’d posted two depressed-looking selfies: one of her in bed, her hair covering her eyes, her mouth slack; another of her holding a cigarette, staring blank and expressionless past the camera. But it’s the smiling “Things do get better” post that gets me in the gut. To see that she was trying, that she had hope, even, just twelve days before she decided there would be no hope for her ever again. In this picture, she’s smiling, but her eyes are glassy, with dark circles under them. I can see the strain, the effort it took her to feel optimistic. Or maybe I can only see that now, looking back, knowing she’d be dead less than two weeks later. Would Plath’s reference to carbon monoxide in “A Birthday Present” (“Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in”) feel as ominous if you didn’t know she died exactly that way soon after writing it?
I know that Heather’s Instagram isn’t a work of art on par with Ariel or Pearl. But it was a hurting woman’s connection to the world; it was how she expressed herself. And now it’s an archive rich with posthumous meaning. So I don’t think the comparison is that much of a stretch, actually.
* * *
—
On Thanksgiving Day 2014, four days before she died, Heather posted ten times in a single day (before that she averaged more like once a day), almost all throwback pictures ranging from a year or two old to a couple from way back in the day—the Heather I recognize the most intimately. They’re all happy pictures, a lot of sunshine: Heather hula-hooping at a music festival; Heather smiling with a view of Jerusalem behind her; Heather posing with her family dog; Heather sharing a margarita with her ex, drinking from a single glass with two straws, like a ’50s malt shop image. Like she was feeling nostalgic, reminding herself of good times. If I’d still been following her then, and seen this flurry of images, would I have commented on one of the ones I recognized? It feels, now, like that’s what she was asking for—for someone to say “Yes, I was there, I remember—you’ve been happy.”
Or maybe she was consciously curating the last public images of herself, pushing the morose selfies down on her feed.
The last post in that flurry—also Heather’s last post ever—is a meme, white text against a dark purple background: “i put the hot in psychotic.” A decade later, this meme and the bleak black-and-white selfies are clearly recognizable as pitch-perfect examples of the sad girl aesthetic. Heather didn’t have a Tumblr account, as far as I know, but she embodied the aesthetic on her Instagram right at the time when it started to spill over onto that platform and others beyond its birthplace.
Today, the once-controversial jokes of the online sad girl are ubiquitous far beyond their original little corner of the internet, with people posting casually about depression and dissociation on their otherwise professional Twitter accounts. There’s even a perceived valor in doing so—sometimes the tweets are jokey and self-deprecating, but often they take an earnest tone and are accompanied by the hashtag #TalkingAboutIt. Writer Sammy Nickalls started the hashtag in 2017, explaining in a blog post, “Staying silent about my struggles, especially when I’m able to speak up without facing consequences, was just contributing to the stigma surrounding mental health. I vowed to be open about my mental health using the hashtag #TalkingAboutIt, and I encouraged my followers to do the same.”
The Reddit group r/depressionmemes—a mix of the general “lol life is pain” brand of memes you can expect to find on other social media, and posts that directly express, if in meme form, suicidal ideation—has tens of thousands of members. And the sad girl lives on in yet another generation on TikTok, where #SadTok videos of (still pretty, young, mostly white) girls looking into the camera as tears roll down their cheeks have millions and millions of views.
When Heather and I loudly proclaimed our misery as teenagers, we were signaling our separation from the herd, our rejection of the social standard. Declaring that we saw the world clearly enough to see how fucked up everything was, even if the powers that be didn’t want us to notice. But these sentiments aren’t subversive anymore—they’re almost assumed as a baseline.
This sense that everyone is depressed feels like it’s at least in part a reaction to the political climate and the literal climate of the last few years; the pervasive feeling that the world is ending, for real this time. Impending fascism, global pandemic, daily mass shootings, and frequent catastrophic weather events have primed us all for malaise. And there’s something cathartic about how normal it feels now to say out loud that everything feels hopeless and you’re not sure you’re going to live much longer. But I also can’t help but think of Heather these days when I see one internet acquaintance after another post about being too depressed to cook—not as if this were a dire state to be in, but as a casual way to ask for recommendations of easy recipes; or express their enjoyment of new music by any of the new guard of sad girls like Mitski, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers by posting about how hard they’re crying. It all feels so normal that it doesn’t worry me at all. But the fact that it doesn’t worry me sometimes worries me. If jokes about wanting to die are so casual now, how are we supposed to know when somebody means it?
The internet makes it difficult to tell what’s real. This is a common conversation in terms of presenting only our most manicured selves, especially on Instagram—the most aspirational of the mainstream social media platforms. The prevalence of posts about depression feels like a reaction to the too-perfect online aesthetic that developed with the rise of influencers. People are rejecting the shiny illusion and trying to show each other that sometimes our hair is dirty and our desks are cluttered and our coffee doesn’t have little foam hearts on it; that sometimes we even want to die. But even when people try to post about the messy, ugly, real stuff, it still feels like a manicured presentation. Like it’s all still curated and put on for consumption, another lever to pull in adjusting how we want to be seen by the world. So much so that even a depression that will soon lead to suicide can feel, through the filter of social media, like content.
Heather wasn’t just sad, she was bipolar, prone to severe depression. We all knew this, but because being a sad girl had been part of how she presented herself to the world for so long, it seemed like she could go on posting mental illness memes and putting “Ball and Chain” on the jukebox at the bar forever and ultimately she’d be okay.
* * *
—
Heather died on the first day of December. We waited until the earth thawed the following spring to visit her grave, so we could plant flowers. Her sister, Jenn, picked us up in Manhattan—Raiona, Sydney, and me—and we drove together out to the Jewish cemetery in New Jersey.
I knew it would be hard, but I had intellectualized the idea of a grave, reminding myself that the physical remains are not the person. Heather is in my memories of her, in the sound of her laugh that I play over and over in my head to make sure I never forget it, in the places we used to go to dinner together, and in the songs we used to sing, the notes she scrawled in so many of my notebooks, always signed with a now-painful “Forever, —Heather.” She’s not in a box under the ground.
After driving the winding route through the cemetery, Jenn stopped the car. Raiona and I looked at each other across the backseat and both exhaled slowly before unlatching our seatbelts and opening the doors. Jenn was already out of the car and sobbing softly when we stepped out into the boomingly bright sun. The sky was an almost fluorescent blue, the grass spray-paint green. We were far enough inside the cemetery that we couldn’t hear traffic. Without even a light breeze to rustle the leaves, the silence rang loud and sharp, as heightened as the too-bright sky, the perfectly warm but crisp spring air, cut through only by Jenn’s low moans and my own abnormally resonant breath.
Jenn crumpled next to an uneven rectangle of dirt, the only grave in the section too new for grass to have grown over it, with no stone set in yet. As soon as I saw it, so anonymous, so haphazardly filled in, the tears came. I understood then that the grave site is not the person, but the symbol of their having been loved. To see Heather’s looking so bare, it felt like she had been tossed aside and forgotten. I felt a desperate need to make it visibly clear that she was in fact loved, missed, remembered.
As we turned over the dirt and planted a row of tulips, then a row of hyacinths and daffodils, I felt an immense relief. We were performing the physical act of missing her.
Heather was no longer looking up at the same moon as me, maintaining our unspoken bond of friendship. Without her participation, that quiet awareness wasn’t enough. And there, with my hands deep in the dirt making room for each bulb, reaching into the ground toward her, I knew it hadn’t been enough when she was alive, either.
It felt good to perform this act of care for her, but I wished I had done a better job when she was alive.
Sitting in the car on the way back to the city, all of us silent, staring out at the too-perfect day and thinking our own thoughts about Heather, I glanced down and saw the dirt under my nails. I wanted it to stay there forever, a reminder to tend my friendships, no matter how strong the unspoken bond; to show I care, before the only thing left to do is plant flowers.
How to Support a Friend Through Grief
1. Suffer a tremendous loss early in your life. Perhaps the death of a parent at such a young, pivotal age that grief becomes a central part of who you are. Your homeland. Become comfortable in grief, learn its coastlines and caves intimately, so that when someone you love arrives on its shore, stunned and choking, you can greet them and show them around. Like when you and Carly met in college, when she was new to New York, and instead of the usual bars near school you brought her to Red Hook to see your old friends play music, and you stayed long after the bar pulled down the gates and started letting everyone smoke inside. Sharing your secret spots.
